Farewell to 'The X-Files'

WASHINGTON, May 19 (UPI) -- It had to happen: the last new "X-Files" episode ran Sunday night bringing to a close the most phenomenally successful science-fiction/horror series to run on American network television.

The achievement was real and the scale of it was actually stupendous, and still largely not understood, especially by literary critics and other intellectuals who are always the last to recognize such obvious things.

"The X-Files" was serious and significant popular art and like most such works, it was essentially the achievement of one man -- Chris Carter. It brought the skills of television cinematography and writing to technical levels never before seen and seldom even imagined. And it did so for a remarkably high proportion of the total vast oeuvre of almost 200 episodes.

"The X-Files" was the obvious and even reverential son of a remarkable and greatly underrated tradition of American TV gothic drama going back through "Kolchak The Night-Stalker" to the wonderful "Twilight Zone" of Rod Sterling in the late 1950s and early '60s. Its parallels and contrasts to "The Twilight Zone" are profound. But "The Twilight Zone" was only a half-hour show. Each of the 156 episodes was a short story that stood alone -- almost always with an "O. Henry" style twist at the end and its technical direction and special effects were simplistic and derisory -- inevitably so given the TV technology and budgetary resources available at the time.

"The X-Files," by contrast, was a 1-hour show that ran for nine seasons. It remained inventive and groundbreaking in its plots and dramatic devices to the end. It had the same lead characters and faced the challenge of integrating its stand-alone stories into an over-all main plot architecture about evil alien government conspiracies.

Like the steel frame of a skyscraper, this "mythology" was the structure that held all the disparate parts of the series together. Like the great Paris Cathedral of Notre Dame, it was magnificent and inspiring, terrifying and horrible, and defied the humble constraints of common sense. But also like Notre Dame, it worked, and it imprinted its vision and symbolism on the imaginations of an entire nation and age.

The 9-year era of the "X-Files" was a lot shorter than the half of a millennium or so that Notre Dame dominated the religious imagination of Europe before the somewhat cheerier Renaissance came along. It was the decade of the 1990s, and its time has already passed. But the show's imaginative achievement was real enough. It was, in fact, a vastly gloomy, anti-democratic and anti-patriotic show in its basic premise.

This was: that the U.S. government was cowardly, corrupt and mercilessly ruthless in conducting an endless number of horrific secret scientific conspiracies. It had also succeeded for at least 4 1/2 decades in hiding the evidence that alien beings from outer space had not only crashed on earth, but were "among us" working with human co-conspirators who had subverted the U.S. government for their own nefarious ends.

To believe the central premise of "The X-Files' you had to believe that supermarket tabloids did not exist, and that everything could be covered up forever. As common sense, it was absurd. But as a dramatic device to frame the series, it worked incredibly well. Every week, intrepid FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully probed their gleaming search lights into a pitch black world in which every horror and terror of Western European mythology was bizarrely, yet wonderfully updated and transmogrified into a new populist mythology of working class America.

"The X-Files' could not have been set in Britain or any other European country. Even Russia, for all its enormous extent, is too settled, too explored, too regimented and too organized throughout its history to have served as a theater or backdrop for it. "The X-Files" was a mythic celebration of the mysterious vastness of America. There were always new forests where piranha-like insects or hundreds-of-years-old troglodytes lived. When vampires roamed the American West in "The X-Files" they did not live in remote, Transylvanian-style castles but in trailer parks. And they entered the homes of their victims by transforming themselves not into eerie bats but into smiling, apparently harmless pizza deliverymen.

Modern America's great technical infrastructure generated grotesque yet wonderful original horrors too. In one early episode, Mulder and Scully, in one of the first of their many politically motivated demotions off the "X-Files," moonlighted investigating murders committed by The Flukeman: a humanoid worm stalking the sewers of the New Jersey city of Newark. It turned out to be a refugee from Chernobyl.

In another episode, Scully did the leg work on Mulder's -- as usual brilliant -- intuition as to how a successful New York City photo-journalist always managed to be in the right place at the right time to photograph people who suddenly died, usually violently through crime or accidents.

The episode was clearly inspired by the work of the legendary 1940s New York photographer Wee-Gee that was also the subject of a fine movie called "The Public Eye" starring Joe Pesci. But here, Wee-Gee was transformed into an almost 150-year-old man who could never die because Death had spared him during a cholera epidemic in the 1850s. He had been left with a Valkyrie-like instinct for sensing when someone was about to die. And he was obsessed with catching the appearance of Death Himself at the crucial instant on camera. He hoped that if he did, he would finally be allowed to die himself and get relief. In that episode in particular, the writing was of a power and poetic vision that only the finest masters could aspire to.

"The X-Files'" phenomenal popular success far outstripped that of "The Twilight Zone" or any of the many "Star Trek" TV series. It was the mythology and the dark intimations of government coverup that hit the national chord and drew in the views by the multiple millions. But artistically, it was so many of the haunting, stand-alone episodes that were the essence of its excellence. It was as if Edgar Allan Poe had melded with Ray Bradbury and they filled the fast-food outlets and shopping malls of apparently carefree 1990s America with mystery and terror. They filled them with poetry too, and a dark, echoing sense of fear and wonder.

Take Route 66 west and you will not only sense Elvis out there driving his eternal Cadillac and haunting the cheeseburger joints of your imagination, but Mulder and Scully will be on the job, too. There they are, just round the corner from you in every mall, endlessly pursuing their baseball-playing gray aliens and apologetic carnivorous monsters attending therapy sessions in vain and desperate efforts to master their compulsions.

The Truth is Still Out There.